Workflow assignment emails missing attachments, or homepage To Do pane disappears

Hello GP community!

I wanted to share two unique issues that I recently came across in support cases, and wanted to share the details in case anyone else runs into these problems.

The first issue to highlight is we've had a few cases reporting that the Word Template attachments on workflow emails were sporadically missing from the email. This issue didn't seem to have a pattern, but customers would report that anywhere from once a week to several times per day, the workflow assignment email would be received without the Word Template attachment. In digging into this issue, what I found is that there's a timing event between initial submission of the workflow, and the second 'submission' from the Enter Comment window that can cause this issue.

When you click the first approve, this starts the Word Template generation process. This process involves GP pulling the blank template out of SQL where it's stored as a binary blob, and storing this file in the user's Temp directory. GP then outputs an XML file into the same Temp directory, and the Word Template code combines the files into a single Word doc in the Temp directory. This file is the actual email attachment.

If you click the second Submit button on the 'Enter Comment' windows before this entire process finishes, then the email will get sent without the attachment. You simply need to wait until GP finishes processing, and then submit. GP will alert the user to the process via the status bar along the bottom, it will say "Templates Processing x/y". Once this goes away, the template process has finished and the email can be sent.

This issue can be a little odd, because I was only able to reproduce it internally by submitting 4 PM batches to a workflow simultaneously via the Navigation List, each one generating a Word Template Edit List for the batch. I couldn't reproduce it when submitting through the window, which could be simply because the time to process one Word Template is much shorter than the time it takes to process multiple ones.

Overall, just wait until GP stops saying "Templates Processing" before clicking the second submit button, and all the attachments should be included in the workflow emails.

The second issue I wanted to highlight is that the homepage To Do pane disappears if the Workflow Tasks is selected, and the user has more than 134 pending Workflow tasks. I was able to reproduce this by submitting 134+ documents to a single user, and then logging into GP and looking at the home page. With less than 134 workflow tasks, the To Do pane will appear fine. However, as soon as there's too many tasks, the To Do pane stops functioning entirely, likely due to some kind of Dexterity limit on the data in the home page list itself. The only workaround I was able to find for this would be to not use the homepage in this scenarios, and approve some documents until the total amount is below 134. If you get into this state, the user would have to use the Navigation List in order to approve the document, or pull up the documents in their respective windows and approve there. Basically, if the home page item disappears, this means the user needs to reduce the number of documents pending their approval and then it will start working again.